The Pyramids of Mexico
In Coleshill's Footsteps Seventh of the Tavistock Expeditions Sessions 1-2 The Pyramids of America ''(By Bartholomew Coleshill, published 1886) This book relates the adventures of Mr. Coleshill in 1884. He was a well-known explorer and author of bestselling books about his travels, clearly pitched to attract a predominantly female audience. Mrs. Tavistock, though born two generations too late to be one of his original readers, is a big fan. She has decided to send the next Expedition to verify the findings in his third book, for which he could not provide sufficient verification for academic purposes. The crate with his photographic negatives and rubbings was stolen en route for home. The party were therefore to travel to Veracruz in Mexico, then up the Rio Papaloapan to find an Aztec pyramid-temple complex occupied, when Coleshill was there, by a neo-Aztec cult reviving the ‘old ways’ of worship, including human sacrifice and ‘tame’ jaguars accompanying the priests. Coleshill reported that the High Priest had a definitely Egyptian-style sacred ibis pectoral, which he saw clearly through his spyglass. Unfortunately, though the priest was killed in the subsequent battle, the pectoral went missing. Coleshill then found that the carvings at the top of the central temple pyramid were variants on Egyptian hieroglyphics, of which he made photographs and rubbings. Without those documentary proofs, Coleshill’s claim that there was a mystical link between the Egyptians and the Aztecs was dismissed as ‘not proven’ by the academic authorities of the time. However, some of the Tavistock Foundation’s favourite psychics back his claims of a link which explained their sharing of pyramid power. Mrs. Tavistock therefore wants the Expedition to bring back documentary evidence of the carvings as evidence of the psychic significance of pyramid power. If it is also possible to uncover more details of the neo-Aztecs and obtain that pectoral it would be a massive feather in their cap – it will be a real item of power after all these centuries. The party started their research phase. Kohath focused on the diseases and venomous flora and fauna of the area, but was mostly concerned with were-jaguars. He confirmed that they’ve been associated with the religions of the area since the Olmec days. Like other were-beasts they are resistant to most forms of damage, but silver affects them normally. He suggested that they should carry silver bullets, but so that they could all share them they should all carry the same calibre of weapon – specifically pistols, since jungle encounters with them are not likely to be at the kind of range where rifles are useful. After long discussions of the ‘best’ handgun, they decided on the Smith & Wesson Police Special in .38 calibre as it was the heaviest Albert could fire with any degree of accuracy. Their journey to Veracruz was uneventful, though Kohath was somewhat paranoid about the German string quartet sharing their ship to Savannah, Georgia. Three of them were older than the ''SS-Ahnenerbe agents they had encountered earlier, and four isn’t as many as they encountered before, but still… In Veracruz Donald managed to find an English trader who could recommend reputable suppliers of the equipment they’d need for jungle exploration, and a boat-owner they could rely on and who spoke English: Capt. Ramon Rodriguez. His boat, the Mexican Queen'', is a motor-boat crewed by two of his sons and a nephew, plus his'' widowed sister-in-law Annabella to do the cooking and cleaning. Capt. Rodriguez boasted that he knew the Rio Papaloapan like the back of his hand – he’s been sailing it since 1913. But he didn’t recognise the name of the town Coleshill visited, San Miguel del Verde. It is quite common for villages on the river to vanish – when the local soil is exhausted the villagers move on to a new site – but not towns. Rodrigues thought that Coleshill may have exaggerated its size for dramatic effect, or changed the name for English readers uncomfortable with the long Indian words for Mexican towns. He also doesn’t know of any abandoned mission stations along the river, but there has been one in about the right area as long as he’s been working the river. Perhaps between Coleshill’s visit and his arrival it was rebuilt. And he’s never heard of a crocodile or alligator snatching someone off a boat. They don’t grow as big as the one Coleshill described any more, and are scared of boats because they make good eating. On their new trader friend’s advice, they loaded up with insect repellent and head-nets, packed textiles as gifts for the tribespeople in the interior, and set sail on the Mexican Queen. The journey was uneventful for the first six and a half days, giving them some time to master the basics of Latin American Spanish (as opposed to the European Spanish they had learned in English classrooms) and life on the river. St Anthony’s Mission, six and a half days up-river, is the only local mission station Rodriguez knows about. But the jolly Jesuits in charge (Father Easter and Brother Cooper) say that this cannot be the place: this mission has been here since 1868, when it was started by a pair of Americans who felt they needed to demonstrate repentance for their actions in the Indian Wars. The local tribes make war on each other occasionally in border disputes, but they are not cannibals. They have no knowledge of any other mission station being attacked in such a way. They haven’t heard of San Miguel del Verde either – neither of them has been here as long as Rodriguez. And the direction of the mountains was wrong too: they were visible in the south-west, not slightly west of south. That direction was up-river: Coleshill would not have left the river to march through the jungle in that direction. The Jesuits confirmed that there are still inter-tribal wars in the area, though it’s at peace now so if they want to explore they can pass from one tribe’s area to another easily. There are reputed to be were-jaguars in the area – Father Easter has even spoken to someone who claimed to be one. (It was a moral dilemma: he should have tried to destroy the devil-beast within the traveller, but he couldn’t attack the reasonably polite human passing through the mission.) Another day upstream is a place where the condition might be right: the river turns north-west and some mountains do lie just south of west from there. Beyond that range of hills, the river turns south-west and there is a town in approximately the right place, but it’s called Tlacojalpan, not San Miguel. But then the regional Governor and his Army contingent was mentioned. The Governor’s office is in the regional capital, over 100 miles away through the jungles to the north. To get there, they’d need to go back down the Papaloapan, forty miles up the coast past Veracruz, and up the Rio Actopan. The party decided to check out the river up past Tlacojalpan as far as a sailing boat could possibly have travelled in twelve days, stopping at any place where the locals may be able to give them a clue. If that doesn’t work, they’ll repeat the expedition up the Actopan. Session 3 A place that seemed to meet the description in Colesford’s book was found a half-day upstream of the mission station, where the river turned back north-west and the mountain foothills to the south-west seemed to have a ‘notch’ in them that fitted his description. The first order of business was to hold a séance to check out whether the lumps in the ground were the remnants of the mission station Colesford described, or just another abandoned village. Despite his best efforts, Willie couldn’t find any spirits of Western missionaries to talk to, just Mexican farmers irate that their homes had fallen down and their fields were reverting to jungle. (They had no idea of the passage of time so didn’t realise the soil had been exhausted and their descendants moved on.) The party discussed heading off into the jungle to investigate, but decided to carry on up the river to check out Tlacojalpan first. When they asked his opinion later, Capt. Rodriguez reckoned that since Tlacojalpan is on the far side of the first foothills it would be closer to the possible ‘notch’ so it might be better to go from there anyway. Tlacojalpan proved to be a lively market town. Capt. Rodriguez guided Donald to the Mayor’s office and acted as their interpreter while Mrs Stanley went in search of women in their 60s who might have been around when Coleshill was present. Neither the mayor, nor his father whose father had been mayor at the time, nor the gossipy old women could remember the events Coleshill talked about. The mayor’s father did recall one group of Europeans who went into the jungle seeking Aztec pyramids, but it was in 1908. Their guides returned and relayed the sad news that all the Europeans had died of diseases or animal bites (two spiders and a snake). He had to check the records to find their nationality – they had been French. With the link between the natives and werejaguars in mind, Donald asked the mayor if he knew of any of them in the area. The mayor said yes, there was a family of them living not far away, the Perez Alonsos, and there was often one of them in town to sell their crops. Donald was a bit surprised to hear that they lived openly in the area – what happens if someone strays into their territory during the full moon, for example? Clearly the mayor wouldn’t want to go to a lot of effort: if someone was killed by a werejaguar, there would be no way to be sure which of the extended family it was, or even that they hadn’t been attacked by a natural beast. So people just stayed away from their territory at the wrong time of the month. Now they were just a couple of days before no moon, so everyone feels safe with werejaguars trading in town. Asking for the Perez Alonso stall in the market led them to José Perez Alonso, a man in his mid-20s of clear Indian descent. He confirmed that he was a werejaguar. He also knew that there was an old pyramid a couple of weeks’ trek into the jungle, but he’d never been there himself. His uncle had told him about it – his uncle is a bit of a wanderer and enjoys new sights and exploration. Yes, his uncle probably would be willing to guide tourists there – in fact he used to guide tourists at the dinosaur realm in Venezuela (a reference to the previous Beresford Travellers campaign of the early 1870s, who found the ‘lost valley’ which is now a significant tourist attraction for wealthy travellers.) He even learned to speak English there. José was expecting to be in town for a couple of days more to sell his stock and then buy the necessary supplies for his family, so they agreed to meet at dawn on the third day. Having been warned to keep expenditure down on this expedition, the party decided to let Capt. Rodriguez make a trading run back to Veracruz rather than pay him a retainer to sit at the dock. They reckoned that he could probably get to Veracruz and back before they managed to walk to the pyramid, do a reasonable archaeological survey, and return. So the only faces they knew disappeared down-river, and at dawn on the third day they assembled at the marketplace as José arranged, to find canoes and local paddlers waiting for them. It is apparently much easier to get to the Perez Alonso territory by boat… Session 4 Paddling deep into the jungle in a pair of canoes, the party left ‘civilisation’ far behind them and put themselves at the mercy of a family of were-jaguars… Who received them warmly and haggled a price to provide a guide (Uncle Paco) and bearers for their expedition. They had a party the night before departing, and Willie spotted a feature from Coleshill’s book: the brightly coloured war-bonnets he had described and photographed were being worn by the men for dancing. There was much muttering in the shadows about that – whether ‘savages’ would wear bright colours in war-bonnets to show their lack of fear of the enemy, or take them off so they could blend into the jungle. Asked about them by Donald, José explained that the feather bonnets were a sign of the wearer’s hunting prowess: the more and brighter the feathers they contained the better a hunter he was because he had to get close enough to the birds to take them down. A bonnet wouldn’t last much longer than ten years – some of the old men were still wearing older ones than that but they were looking very bedraggled after years of flashing around the dance-floor. The party never directly asked whether they were war-bonnets… Mrs Stanley enjoyed the local moonshine rather too much and leapt up to join in the dancing, dragging a highly embarrassed Albert with her till he could break away with a promise to find her another drink. They marched out next day with Mrs Stanley rather the worse for her hangover, plunging deep into the uncharted jungle (though after the first day Mrs Stanley had recovered enough to start making her own chart). There were no great hazards in the expedition, just endless days of slogging through the jungle. Albert, Haggart, and Mrs Stanley kept the interest level up with snake-bites, spider-bites, waterborne diseases, and painful rashes from the local vegetation. There were few days when Kohath’s magic wasn’t called upon to neutralise venom, toxins, or bugs – even a broken ankle one day when Haggart slipped off a rock. Fresh meat was provided at intervals by Uncle Paco and Juan, one of his nephews who was a bearer: the two stripped off and left the camp to transform to jaguar form to hunt, bringing back deer and pigs. (The other bearers were not were-jaguars, just normal Indian stock.) This was taken as a sign that they weren’t coy about it so the party asked more details. The oral history is that the were-jaguar line are descended from the guards of the Olmec priests – their God bestowed the ‘gift’ on the elite corps of guards to make them a hereditary line. Later, they had a tradition of serving as guards to the Aztecs, but the job fell through when the Conquistadors arrived as the Catholics did not see were-jaguars as an asset. Uncle Paco is not the only one of the extended clan to have worked in the dinosaur park – their toughness in were form has given the brighter dinos a certain wariness about attacking humans. Eventually, ten days out – two days later than Uncle Paco had estimated since the party hadn’t kept up the speed he expected – he guided them to the pyramid as the afternoon was fading to dusk on the first full-moon night. While the normal bearers set up camp, Paco and Juan left to get clear of the area because they realised how uneasy the party was becoming, and the party immediately started the first scratchings at the overgrowth. By the time the light had faded, they had a section of wall cleared to reveal closely fitting unmortared stonework, and a test pit found the edge of a flagstone forced within a foot of the surface by a tree root. Next day the digging started in earnest. In full daylight they could see the slight difference on the northern side where the stairs were – unfortunately it was different because the steps had allowed greater soil accumulation than the steeply-banked sides, so there was more vegetation to dig out. From the top they could see that this was a single pyramid, none of the other eight of the complex reported by Coleshill broke the canopy. A week’s hard digging by party and bearers alike confirmed that this was exactly what they’d expect of an Aztec pyramid: no hieroglyphics, no traces of sacrificial fires where the victims’ hearts were burned, no bullet-strikes from the Mexican army battle Coleshill described. The nearest village, just two hours’ march away, told them that the locals didn’t know the story of an Aztec renaissance fifty years earlier, they didn’t know of any complex of nine pyramids, and they’d never seen anything like the hieroglyphics they were shown. The nearest other pyramid they knew of was to the south – from their description, Paco estimated that it would take about eight days for the party to reach it. Kohath was in favour of packing up and leaving quickly, but was argued down by Mrs Stanley who was insistent that now they were here, they’d do a proper archaeological survey, record everything properly, and clear up any speculation about this having ‘Egyptian’ links, so no future expeditions would waste their time. Willie tried to do a séance to speak with the spirits of the place, but they resolutely ignored this heathen intruding on their sacred space and he heard nothing. Eventually, they had all the evidence they could gather. The discussion about going on to the next known pyramid was brief – by now, no-one had any faith in Coleshill’s book, and even if he had been telling the truth, the next pyramid was more than three times the travel time from the riverside town that he’d described. Ten more days of jungle marching brought them back to the Perez Alonso homestead for another party, then back to Tlacojalpan for a hot bath and a boat down-river. They had to lounge around in Tlacojalpan for a few days before the bad news came: a letter from Capt. Rodriguez. On the way back from Veracruz to pick them up, the Mexican Queen had collided with some unknown obstacle and sank. Luckily, it sank slowly enough that everyone got off safely, but they would need to find other transport. The Papaloapan was busy enough that they had no trouble doing so, and on the way back down-river they drafted the message for the Foundation. By this time, no-one saw Coleshill’s book as a reliable record. The possibilities were that he had falsified the timeline and gone further up-river into the mountains, or that he had gone up the Rio Actopan instead to put him closer to the regional capital Xalapa, which would be in keeping with his managing to enlist help from the regional Governor. They could extend the expedition to check further up the Papaloapan, or to Xalapa, or write it off in their belief that there was basically no truth in Coleshill’s story. They met up with Capt. Rodriguez back in Veracruz, where he was working on the boat he had been able to buy with his insurance money. It wasn’t as good as the Queen, but they would be able to make it so with a month or two’s work. Donald pitched in to help till they received a response from the Foundation. As they walked through the streets towards the hotel, Willie noticed the local newspaper-sellers and realised that turning out the Army to deal with murderous cultists would surely have made the papers, so they could check out which river it had actually been on. Mrs Stanley arranged researchers in the central library and the newspaper archives to look for the story – not just in 1884, when Coleshill said that it happened, but for some years before to check whether he had stolen someone else’s story. They found no mention of Coleshill, his expedition, or the Army turning out to deal with an Aztec resurgence. Moreover, the publicity-hungry regional Governor he named had existed, but had resigned from his office in 1882 to avoid corruption charges, so Coleshill couldn’t have enlisted his help two years later. They added this information to the cable back to the Foundation, and eventually the response came back from Dalgetty: give up and come home. Don’t waste any more time or money on it. Though some people were sceptical from the beginning, Willie got the experience points for being the first one to realise “He’s Captain Park!” (A reference to the Cheapass game Captain Park’s Imaginary Expedition'', on which this scenario was closely based.)'' Category:Adventures